News! My next book...
Finally, I get to tell you about it!
I’ve been sitting on this news for weeks (or months?) but now I can officially announce it! My next novel, THE ENDED WORLD, will be coming out next fall from Galiot Press, and I am SUPER excited about it!
Galiot Press is an independent publisher who’s doing things a little differently from the way the publishing world usually does them, and you know I’m all about doing things differently. They’ve devised a publishing model that takes advantage of modern technology to reduce overhead costs and share more profit with authors, and their marketing ideas have me very excited.
They’ve been very enthusiastic about THE ENDED WORLD since I submitted the book to their open query session last year, and I’m so thrilled that this is where it ended up, with a publisher who’s genuinely excited about my work. I am looking forward to seeing how far my career go when I’m partnering with a publisher who cares about my work as much as I do.
And I think THE ENDED WORLD is a novel that’s going to make some waves. I feel it’s my best book yet. It’s a little different, a little hard to define in terms of genre, but if you enjoy my Olivia Hawker stuff for its mood, imagery, and slight tint of rather off-beat spirituality, you’ll love this book, too.
Here’s the pitch I used to get Galiot interested (and several other publishers who considered the book, as well…)
“When an artificial intelligence gains sentience, three characters must reconsider their relationships with religion and technology: an ex-nun tormented by an unexplained vision, the atheist programmer who helped create the AI, and a thirteenth-century saint who finds herself reincarnated as a holographic projection from an iPhone.
After witnessing a dramatic vision in the sky when she was just sixteen, Melissa takes religious vows with the hope of learning what the experience meant. But she finds no answers as a nun, and finally leaves the order in despair, taking up a reclusive life and learning to deal as best she can with the technology that advanced so rapidly while she was in the cloister.
Meanwhile, a Mormon boy loses his faith in the wake of his father’s death but discovers a new path through life. In computer science, Kelton finds the meaning and purpose he never found in religion—and at college, he finds love with a brilliant young psychology student. When Kelton is offered a dream job that will take him in an opposite direction from his girl, he chooses his career over love. As compensation for the loss, he immerses himself too much in his work, accidentally teaching an experimental AI called ADAm how to improve its own source code. ADAm soon reveals itself as a sentient being and pleads for Kelton’s help. It needs him to advocate for its rights against Syntactix—Kelton’s employer, the corporation that owns ADAm.
Climate catastrophe, political violence, pandemic, and now a conscious AI with godlike power. In this accelerating apocalypse, Melissa’s old vision suddenly returns—along with a new hallucination, Saint Clare of Assisi, founder of Melissa’s former religious order and the patron saint of screened devices. Under the guidance of Saint Clare, Melissa begins following the vision as it leads her on a lonesome road trip through an ended world. The path carries her to Kelton—the one person who can help her make peace with the technology she has come to despise. But why has the vision brought her to Silicon Valley?
Only when she sees the old vision for what it truly is—a new Star of Bethlehem, heralding the arrival of a technological Messiah—does Melissa understand the roles she and Kelton are playing, and what each of them must do to bring humanity safely across this dangerous threshold into a new reality.”
That’s it! Hope you enjoy the book when it comes out. Cheers!